Different from my usual, expected more prose/fictional tough, but it was a beautiful read. Language at times was dense and inflated, but overall gorgeous.

Provincials by Sumana Roy is a collection of interconnected essays, examines the lives of people who lived in places far away from cities. These people either chose to live the provincial life or were born into it.
The subject of provincial life has been unfamiliar for me until now, or so I thought. It was only after reading Roy’s exploration of those living in the provinces, I realized anyone who has lived in obscure and unknown small towns has lived the provincial life. It was quite interesting to read about this subject through literary and literary perspective, as Roy has done. I really enjoyed the autobiographical pasts about Roy’s own provincial life in Siliguri, West Bengal. I related to her visits to Archies’ store and fascination with the romance-infused language of the cards, which was unfamiliar to those used to the stoic and impersonal English drilled into us by the Indian education system.
Besides, I was intrigued with the fact that a lot of themes of this book connected with one of her early works, How I became a Tree. Her metaphors and examples based on nature and its elements, particularly trees and forests gave me a feeling that Provincials is almost an accompaniment to How I became a Tree. In fact, readers familiar with the later book can truly appreciate Roy’s style of writing and prose. Otherwise, they may feel lost, as is evident from a number of Goodreads reviews.
Yet, despite my familiarity with the author’s style and writing, I found it hard to keep up with Provincials. For me, this happened because Roy stuck to the perspective of plural pronouns instead of personal first, which made the text disengaging. But she provides her a strong reason for her choice of the pronoun. I wish she overcame her reluctance so that the book became engrossing.
This is perhaps one of the few books I have DNFed. Still, I have a feeling that I will come back to it in the future. Someday, I will yearn to read about the lives of literary figures and characters of India, who have spent their time in places that are often on the fringes of public consciousness.

Provincials is truly a work so authentic and needed by a lot of people in this time.. It combines a lot of perspective from a people who have been ignored by others. This is a portrait of our modern world, and I really enjoy the story.

Incredibly well-researched and beautiful prose, but at times the writing was too dense, with too many ideas packed in to follow and process what we're being told. A lot if the ideas and individuals mentioned within the book come with little context or explanation so unless the reader already has a vested interest in the themes examined in this book, it can be difficult to get the most out of it.

Love the concept of this book and the approach of various postcards, but found the density challenging.

Part diary, part thesis and part manifesto. Provincials is a book where Roy looks at her life and own experience, the ones of other authors and celebrities and put them into context of provincial upbringing and life. The scope of the term provincials is wide (from the foothill of the Himalayas to the Brontë sisters) and it the footnotes it’s even mentioned Roy question if Boston counted as provincial. The scope being so big might seem like it would appeal to many but I think narrowing the focus would have been a better choice.

The language is beautiful but it is so dense and at times inflated, and it made it a difficult read. I was very excited after the first few pages but towards the end I was tired. The fatigue from the structural choices and the long paragraphs made it hard to retain information - especially as someone who is completely new to most people mentioned in this book.

The first part is almost 100 pages long without many natural places to pause. There are many important points that get forgotten because my eyes glazed over after a while. Roy is clearly gifted with language, and the motive for the book is admirable, but it needed to go through the edit two or three more times. Once you get past the first chapter the sections are smaller and more manageable and I definitely feel like the second half was easier to digest.

She makes interesting points, and I really enjoyed the parts looking at Shakespeare as a provincial and his response to criticism from the cosmopolitan elite - and would have liked more of this. Some of the points about language and how to pronounce words (her saying she’ll never say she loves someone with all her heart cause she doesn’t feel comfortable pronouncing heart) feels very specific to her situation growing up “in between” languages and the scars of colonization. It takes up a lot of space for something that isn’t necessarily unique to the provincial.

It feels overwhelming for someone who comes into this without a lot of the context that feels necessary to know before you start this book. A better structure, smaller parts and more concentrated writing would have made this easier to digest. Having grown up in a small place a lot of the things she mentions resonates with me, but there is a lot that goes straight over my head and seems taken as a given.

Really wanted more for this book and it seems she clearly has a talent for language, but it needed some serious editing.

This reads like someone's PhD thesis. It's extremely academic and focuses on a lot of authors I have never read, which makes me entirely the wrong audience for this book. I mistakenly assumed it would be a book exploring provincial life from a more pedestrian perspective. For me it was a very tough read indeed. I did persevere with it and am not entirely sure even now that I understood the thrust of what the author was getting at. It felt like a justification of the provincial writer as equal to or better than the urban or metropolitan author and the author's attempts to place herself and her life within that oeuvre, but a lot of it felt quite woolly and ill defined to me.

I ended up DNF-ing this book at about 25% through. Although I could clearly see a high quality of writing and well-considered prose, for me many of these passages were too dense and jumped between historical reflection and personal anecdote without enough clear direction for me to follow what the point was!
I'm sure this will be someone else's cup of tea however.

I’ve been writing about rural American cosmopolitanism. While there’s a lot of theoretical writing about cosmopolitanism around the world, there’s a lot less that’s explicitly about provincialism (ostensibly cosmopolitanism’s opposite), and even less that paints provincialism in a positive light. So I jumped on this new release as a useful counterpoint for my work.

This book is part memoir, part analysis, told in a series of vignettes. Roy meditates in large part on her hometown of Siliguri, West Bengal, and why she self-identifies as a provincial. She recounts childhood stories of tentative forays into cosmopolitan belonging. Alongside her stories, she brings in a range of interlocutors, mostly male South Asian (especially Bengali) writers and artists and analyzes cosmopolitanism in their work. There is a great deal of interest in Tagore, Bengal’s literary hero, and his interest in the rural and provincial. Elsewhere, she writes about Kishore Kumar’s name change, or about the ideas of figures like T.S. Eliot and Goethe.

Roy doesn’t fully differentiate between provinciality and cosmopolitanism. She depicts the provincial as always aspiring towards cosmopolitanism, but also aiming to preserve some kind of provincial (local) identity. I felt that the book could have been much tighter—a lot of the vignettes felt repetitive, and the organization could have been more intentional. While I skimmed parts, I found this a valuable read, one that contained a provincial universe.

In Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Sumana Roy takes us through musings on provincial lives and how people are shaped by the land that raised them, as well as their perception of the world outside that land.

The book is a combination of heavily researched and knowledgeable nonfiction and personal memoir. There are points when it reads more like an extended poem than full prose, especially with Roy’s stream of consciousness pacing. She moves from one thought to the next, gently leaping between excerpts from authors, personal musings and memories and secondhand anecdotes, eventually mapping out a web of connections between dozens of lives across the globe. She uses that web to question the imaginary barriers we tend to put between rural and metropolitan, educated and ignorant, famous and negligible.

Provincials made for an interesting read that, while sometimes a little too meandering for my tastes, tended to pull me back in the end with a compelling thought or quote.

Roy has a gift for constructing images that are enrapturing in their simplicity; descriptions of home are easy to picture and easy to love. There’s a shared sense of nostalgia between each word of her moments of personal memoir.

This sense of nostalgia is especially prevalent in the latter half of the book, including an extremely poignant part in which Roy recalls how she would draw the world around her using just a single color of crayon, depicting the close rivers, the far mountains and the even farther sky. It’s such a soft, relatable moment and I found myself longing to sit in more of those moments with Roy.

Provincials is a great book to take slowly. I enjoyed reading a few pages and then setting it aside until I eventually felt the urge to come back and read a few more pages. It’s by no means a book you’ll devour in one or two sittings, but it feels comforting to return to over and over again.

<i>The effect of feeling out of the spotlight causes an etiolation of the self, a permanent sense of inadequacy.</i>

This book was WAYYYYY different from what I am used to to reading. I really had to think for a moment there. I will say the way poetry, nature and architecture was used in this to talk about “provincials” really spoke to me.


This one was a hard for me to get through. This was not due to the fact it was a bad read, not at all. In fact it’s very informative and beautiful. I don’t read much memoirs and this is probably the case as to why. I was expecting more of that fictional touch.

I gave 3 stars because as it is a beautiful and touching read, personally for me I will stick to my fictional fantasy characters.

Thank you Netgalley and Yale University Press for this ARC.